Sixteen-month-old Melissa Trahan was in her baby bed in the back of her house when Pan Am Flight 759 crashed in her Kenner neighborhood. She was thrown past the sidewalk and trapped under her mattress. Four hours later, Jefferson Parish Deputy Sheriff Gerald Hibbs found her, and the toddler, who was in good condition, became known as the "miracle baby," a beacon of hope in the face of massive devastation. Her mother and 4-year-old sister died that day.

Now married with a 2-year-old daughter, Melissa Trahan-Ferrara spoke about the crash in front of an audience for the first time in 30 years at Monday's memorial service in Kenner. Many family members of the dead, witnesses and first responders attended the anniversary service at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church.

"We are all in this together," Trahan-Ferrara said. "We are all survivors. We are not alone." After she finished speaking, her message highlighting the importance of reflecting on the past but living for tomorrow, the crowd rose to its feet in applause.

Pan Am Flight 759 took off from New Orleans International Airport in heavy thunderstorms for Las Vegas just after 4 p.m. on July 9, 1982, and crashed about one minute later. All 146 people on board died along with eight people in Kenner's Morningside Park subdivision, a half mile east of the runway. At the time, it was the second worst aviation crash in United States history.

The disaster, Kenner Mayor Mike Yenni said at the memorial service, forever changed Kenner's history.

Nick Congemi, a former Kenner police chief and currently the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway Police Department chief, was then a police lieutenant in charge of the crash scene for the Kenner Police Department.

Congemi served in the Vietnam War and was a police officer for a dozen years, "but nothing," he said, "can compare or prepare you for what we saw on that day."

"We have not forgotten," Anderson said, referring to the over-capacity crowd who showed up at Eastbank Regional Library Monday.

Freelance journalist Stephen Morton of Savannah, Ga., whose parents, Barbara and James H.B. Morton, died aboard Pan Am 759, traveled to New Orleans with his wife to attend the memorial service. Though he visited the area of the crash site for the first time in 2004, he has never been to the memorial to the victims located at the church.

A month ago, he started a Facebook page remembering the crash and hopes it can become a place for people to share their memories.

"These are all strangers to me, but we all share a bond," Morton said. His parents, from Key West, Fla., had stopped for a layover in New Orleans en route to Las Vegas before a second honeymoon in San Francisco.

Nancy Noone flew from Orlando, Fla. to attend the memorial and the documentary screening. She was 28 years old when she lost her father, Leo Noone, the Pan Am 759 flight engineer.

She has learned from her father and mother, Jenny Noone, who passed away two years ago, to "remember the good times instead of the tragedy."

The good times included professional football games, times surrounded by family and friends and music -- lots of good New Orleans music. "We always had records playing in our house," she said. Coming to visit New Orleans for Jazz Fest, she said, is almost like spending time with her father. She spends hours in the Economy Hall tent.

"I feel like I'm close to my dad when I do that," she said, fondly remembering watching her parents dancing together or dancing with her father as a little girl, her tiny feet atop of his.

Noone's sister, Mary Noone, is featured in Anderson's documentary with her 13-year-old daughter Jenna. Her story shines as one of the film's hopeful moments, as she tells Jenna about the grandfather her daughter never knew.

Anderson spent a year working on the film, which shows archival television news footage, interspersed with personal photos and interviews with first responders, witnesses and relatives and friends of the dead.

Featured in the documentary is Lisa Ledet, who lost her parents, Willie Mae and Louis Ledet, on Flight 759, as well as her aunt and uncle, Armond and Cecile Dupre. Lisa Ledet and her family renovated the flight crash memorial in Our Lady of Perpetual Help's courtyard.

Her son, Trey Parria, designed the new memorial, drawing and taking measurements. New tiles listing each victim's name were placed over the faded tiles.

"I didn't get the chance to meet them," Parria said, of his grandparents, "so this is the one thing I could do for them."

As her family refurbished the 154 tiles, Lisa Ledet researched the victims. She learned that on the plane were family members on their way to a funeral, and an 8-year-old boy flying alone for the first time.

Before she started her research, "it was just names," Ledet said. "You learn there's a story behind every single person on that monument."